Suicide victim's wife speaks at Fort Hood

By Sig Christenson - Express-News :
April 6, 2010

FORT HOOD — Soldiers here will hear the widow of a Marine who killed himself five years ago and a first sergeant's tale of overcoming combat stress as Fort Hood grapples with a spike in suicides that is threatening to eclipse last year's record.

Kim Ruocco, suicide support coordinator for the nonprofit group Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, said over the weekend that she would talk with two brigades of soldiers today.

Post commanders last week asked her to visit Fort Hood, which has sent two divisions to Iraq three times since 2003, and is preparing to send its 4th Combat Aviation Brigade to Afghanistan only a year after its return from Iraq.

The call came after Fort Hood recorded nine questionable deaths since Jan. 1, at least five of them suicides.

Eleven were recorded in 2009, down from 14 in each of the previous three years.

“When you use equipment, you expect it to need maintenance and wear out and at some point and need replacement, and that's the physical equipment,” said retired Veterans Affairs psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who has studied soldier stress and suicides for more than 20 years and thinks the high deployment rate is driving the problem.

“But when it comes to human beings, there seems to be an expectation of infinite, infinite usability, and when someone breaks, the attitude is he was the weak sister, there's something wrong with him. You just simply cannot use them at the pace that they have been used in these wars.”

Ruocco, 46, of Newbury, Mass., will speak next week at Fort Carson, Colo., home to the 4th Infantry Division. That unit was based at Fort Hood until last year, and along with the 1st Cavalry Division has been deployed to Iraq three times since the invasion.

She said Fort Hood commanders are “worried about their recent numbers and they're worried about it getting out of control, and they're trying to quickly put a lid on it.” Suicides dropped after her last appearance here last winter, and more people, Ruocco, said, asked for help.

The San Antonio Express-News found five Fort Hood soldiers died under unknown circumstances in March. Two were confirmed as suicides.

The deaths of five GIs assigned to the post this year have been confirmed as suicides, with another suspected of killing himself. That's about half the number for all of 2009, when 11 Fort Hood GIs committed suicide.

Four other deaths this year are unresolved.

Fort Hood, the biggest post in the Army as the year began with 46,500 troops, had a suicide rate of 26 per 100,000 people from 2006 to 2008, far above the civilian rate of 14.06 per 100,000.

Asked about the problem last week, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, said that he, like other top officials at the Pentagon, believed the high deployment rate since Iraq was contributing to the rise in suicides.

The Army has created a suicide prevention task force and a flurry of programs to counter the problem, but last year set a new record of 160 probable suicides, with 140 of them confirmed at the end of the year.

In 2008, the Army recorded 140 suicides, continuing a rise that began in the wake of 9-11 but intensified after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

“As I look at it, it has to add stress,” Casey told the Express-News. “But if you look at where people commit suicide, a third (kill themselves) in theater, a third have never gone and another third have been and it happens after they come back. And so, like I said, I can't imagine it doesn't add stress.”